Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020) Crime as Cognitive Constraint fight for impunity front and center, going after perpetrators “with a vengeance.” 181 This seems to be based on the “unstated assumption” that a move towards criminalization is a “clear success for the human rights movement.” 182 Criminal prosecution has become the way by which to realize justice, and its expansion – with respect to perpetrators, constitutive acts, and territorial jurisdictions 183 – remains the only question for its proponents. As Frédéric Mégret observes, even mainstream critiques of international criminal law are “constitutive” of the field, such that critiques are mainly aimed at expanding international criminal law’s “toolbox.” 184 The popularity of international criminal law coincides with the “paradigm shift” in international law from a state-centric legal order to one that places responsibility on natural persons. 185 In this light, it resembles David Kennedy’s description of human rights discourse as hegemonic. 186 According to David Kennedy, the language of human rights has become the “dominant and fashionable vocabulary for thinking about emancipation” and “crowds out other ways of understanding harm recompense.” 187 The repercussion of this is to “strengthen” the state apparatus by “structuring liberation as a 15 HARV. HUM. RTS. J. 101 (2002) [hereinafter International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?]. 181. (Anti) Politics and Criminalization, supra note 180, at 58. 182. Anti-Impunity and the Turn to Criminal Law, supra note 180, at 1071; Self-Critique, supra note 180, at 57. Contra Theodor Meron, Human rights Law Marches into New Territory: The Enforcement of International Human Rights in International Criminal Tribunals, THE MAKING OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE (2011) (appearing to suggest that international criminal law and human rights law complement each other); Christine E.J. Schwöbel, The Comfort of International Criminal Law, 24 L. CRITIQUE 169, 171 (2013) (interpreting Meron’s description of the relationship between ICL and human rights law as complementing each other). 183. See, e.g., International Criminal Court Pre-Trial Chamber I, Request under Regulation Article 46(3) of the Regulations of the Court, Decision on the “Prosecution’s Request for a Ruling on Jurisdiction under Article 19(3) of the Statute”, No. ICC-RoC46(3)-01/18 (Sept. 6, 2018). 184. Mégret, supra note 180 (observing that the critics of the field are also “deeply influenced by one’s position within it”); Schwöbel, supra note 182, at 24 (noting that ICL is expanded by the actors constituting and implementing it whether as a judge, practitioner, or academic). 185. Larissa van den Herik and Jernej Letnar Cernic, Regulating Corporations under International Law: From Human Rights to International Criminal Law and Back Again, 8 J. INT’L CRIM. JUST. 725, 740-741 (2010). 186. See International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, supra note 180, at 108. 187. DAVID KENNEDY, THE DARK SIDES OF VIRTUE 9–10 (2004). 174